Local Sports

November 2, 2012

By

Warren Miller

A few months more than a hundred years ago, in the small French village of Megeve, a baker’s wife had a son named Emile.

In the last week, a lot of newspapers and some television news have chronicled the death of 100-year-old Emile Allais. They write about him winning two world championships in the downhill and slalom ski races in 1936 and 1937, as well as an Olympic gold medal in 1936. He would have won a third year in a row if he had not broken his ankle.

October 19, 2012

In the early 1970s, I was producing a movie for my old friend Bob Maynard, the President of Keystone, Colo., at the time. I had met Bob in 1944 when I was skiing at Badger Pass in Yosemite.

I was in the Navy and stationed in San Francisco at the time. I had hitch-hiked to Yosemite for the weekend and paid my $3 to rent skis and boots for the day. Bob Maynard handed me my rental ski boots of soft leather with turned up box toes.

October 12, 2012

Just like every other man in America during the time, I too registered for the draft on my 18th birthday in 1942.

I immediately enlisted in the Naval Officer’s Training Program and was in school when the Normandy invasion took place.

I had just received my commission a month before the horrific battle on a small island in the Pacific, called Iwo Jima. During that battle, near the end of March and into April of 1945, I was in my final training for duty aboard a 110-foot wooden-hulled sub-chaser.